Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Random House employees get $5,000 bonuses, thanks to “Fifty Shades of Grey”

Random House CEO Markus Dohle
announced at the publisher’s Christmas party on Wednesday that he would award
$5,000 bonuses to every member of his staff, from “top editors to warehouse
workers,” reports the New York Times.

E. L. James, British author of the
bestselling erotic novel 'Fifty Shades of Grey' speaks during the presentation
and promotion of the last book of her triology in Lisbon, Portugal. (MANUEL DE
ALMEIDA - EPA)

Random House employees have author E.L. James to thank — her erotic novel,
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” sold more than 60 million copies and has spent 37 weeks
(and counting) at the top of the New York Times’ paperback best-sellers’ list.
That book, along with its two sequels and other hits like Gillian Flynn’s “Gone
Girl” and Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild,” pushed Random House to a particularly
profitable year.

Bonuses are an elusive beast in
the beleaguered publishing industry. As early as 2008, New York magazine was
publishing reports on the industry with titles like “The
End.” Things haven’t improved much since then: In November, HarperCollins
laid off 200 people, Businessweek reports, and Lagardère, the
parent company of publisher Hachette, announced that revenues were down 1.4 percent for the first nine months
of 2012.

That could explain the Internet
mania over this $5,000-bonus. Or it could have to do with the widespread
derision many people feel toward the bondage-ridden “50 Shades of Grey,” which
has 4,500 one-star reviews on Amazon and has
been widely condemned as poorly written, anti-feminist, or some combination of
the two.